Social Philosophy Today

published on August 19, 2022

Willingly Making Reparations, Loss of Unjust Advantage, and Counterfactual Comparative Harm

The Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA) of harm holds that event e harms subject S when e makes S worse off than S would have been without e occurring. In this paper, I argue that CCA is unattractive because it entails that someone who willingly makes monetary reparations harms himself. I explain why I find this entailment unattractive. I then acknowledge that my intuition about the unattractiveness of this entailment might simply be mistaken, so I offer an argument for the claim that willingly making reparations is not a form of self-harm. I argue that willingly making reparations is not harmful to the person who makes them because losing an unjust advantage does not harm. I then consider some objections against my argument and respond to them. Although I concede that some of these objections do more damage to my argument than others, I conclude that CCA is at least prima facie unattractive for the reasons I give and that, at bare minimum, someone who does not think that willingly making reparations harms the maker and/or that losing an unjust advantage is harmful to the person who loses it could not consistently accept any of the formulations of CCA that I consider in this paper.